CHAPTER 2
ZVONKO ČUČKOVIĆ’S SHOCK on seeing the three men step from the Mercedes staff car in Schloss Itter’s lower front courtyard that May day was understandable. Though the Croat had been incarcerated in one German prison or another for sixteen months, he easily recognized the newly arrived prisoners—Édouard Daladier, General Maurice Gamelin, and Léon Jouhaux—because their faces had regularly appeared on the front pages of newspapers across Europe even before the 1939 outbreak of war.
The fact that he was now seeing three of the most influential men in prewar France in the hands of the SS was somehow even more disturbing than his own initial arrest had been.1 And while Čučković did not know the details of how the men had come to be prisoners, he was certain that their journey from the various halls of power in Paris to the decidedly colder and less hospitable halls of Schloss Itter had not been an easy one.
AT SIXTY-ONE, THE STOCKY, barrel-chested, and pugnacious Édouard Daladier was the youngest of the newly arrived prisoner trio. Arguably one of France’s most important and prominent politicians in the years between the end of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second, he’d been born in 1884, the son of a baker. Intelligent and ambitious, he’d first worked as a history teacher and then made the leap into politics in 1912, when at the age of twenty-eight he won his first elected office: mayor of his hometown of Carpentras, near Avignon, in the Vaucluse department of France’s Mediterranean southeast. His political rise was interrupted by World War I, during which he saw four years of brutal trench warfare, first as an enlisted soldier and then as a decorated officer.2
Following the armistice Daladier had returned to politics, serving in a series of increasingly important positions in the left-leaning Radical Socialist Party. He’d been named the organization’s leader in 1927 and served in several interwar governments as a minister responsible for, among other things, the foreign affairs and defense portfolios. In the latter position he pressed for the reform and modernization of the French army, an effort he continued when he was first named premier in January 1933; his government lasted just nine months, however, and was swept from power when it proved incapable of forming a coherent policy to deal with the continuing effects of the Great Depression. Daladier’s second stint as premier, which began on January 30, 1934, lasted less than two weeks because his overly firm response on February 6 to widespread antiparliamentarist riots in Paris organized and led by right-wing groups resulted in sixteen deaths and thousands of injuries.3
While Daladier’s response to the riots led to the fall of his government, the fascist threat inherent in the street fighting prompted him to take his Radical Socialist Party into a leftist coalition with the French Communist Party and its longtime rivals, the Socialists. Known as the Popular Front, the alliance won power in the 1936 elections and the leader of the Socialists, Léon Blum, became premier.4 He named Daladier his minister of national defense and war, a position the latter held until Blum resigned in June 1937. Daladier again served as minister of national defense and war when Blum briefly returned to the premiership in March and April 1938. The quick collapse of the second Blum ministry led French president Albert Lebrun to turn to Daladier, whose third and final term as France’s premier began on April 10, 1938.
It was, of course, a period fraught with political intrigue and the real possibility of war. German forces had marched into Austria less than a month earlier, and Adolf Hitler was making increasingly strident demands regarding the Czech Sudetenland. Though Daladier was personally opposed to negotiating with Hitler—believing that to do so would only whet the Nazi leader’s appetite for further expansion—his vivid memories of the butchery he’d witnessed in the trenches during World War I and his belief that France was not ready for war led him to join British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in signing the September 1938 Munich Agreement that gave the Sudetenland to Germany. Though the French people lauded Daladier as a peacemaker on his return from Munich, he—unlike the gullible Chamberlain—had no illusions that the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia had prevented war. His intent, he later said,5 was to use the “reprieve” provided by Munich to strengthen both France’s defenses and its national resolve.
Though Daladier set about improving his nation’s military power—especially in terms of combat aircraft—the process was far from complete when Germany’s September 1, 1939, invasion of Poland sparked the general European war the French premier had long believed to be inevitable. While several members of his government—including his Conservative Party justice minister, Paul Reynaud—urged him to take swift and decisive action following France’s declaration of war, Daladier sought to minimize French losses and continue the military buildup he felt was absolutely necessary if France was to have any chance of successfully engaging the German juggernaut. Unfortunately for Daladier, his caution was widely seen as weakness, and support for his policies soon began to erode both within his government and among his increasingly bellicose people, and, on March 21, 1940, he resigned as premier and was immediately replaced by Reynaud.
Despite stepping down from the premiership, Daladier remained in government as Reynaud’s minister of national defense and war. This was an act of political pragmatism on the latter’s part, for the two men were poles apart ideologically and were in the first stages of a personal enmity that would eventually grow to epic proportions.6 Their personal differences notwithstanding, Reynaud realized that Daladier was well versed in the intricacies of defense procurement and military reform and kept him in the cabinet. It was a rocky relationship at best, for in addition to their clear distaste for one another, Daladier was a supporter of General Maurice Gamelin, the elderly chief of the French army’s General Staff, whom Reynaud believed to be too old and inept to properly defend France against a German assault. Daladier had appointed Gamelin to his lofty position and took personally any criticism of the army chief.
Even after Gamelin’s bungling failed to halt the German invasion of France that began on May 10, 1940—ineptitude that led Reynaud to replace him just eight days later with the even older and arguably more hidebound General Maxime Weygand—Daladier continued to defend Gamelin as a brilliant military leader brought low by the incompetence and cowardice of others. This attitude helped ensure that the antagonism already existing between Daladier and Reynaud flared into outright hatred. Reynaud made it increasingly difficult for Daladier to carry out the duties of his ministry, and that situation, coupled with the certainty that the appallingly swift collapse of the French army would soon lead to a German occupation, prompted Daladier to join several other prominent politicians who believed they could carry on the struggle from Morocco, a French colony.
The group—which in addition to Daladier included former interior minister Georges Mandel, former secretary of state for finance Pierre Mendès-France, and former minister of marine Caesar Campinchi7—sailed for Casablanca on June 21 aboard the steamer Massilia, arriving four days later to a decidedly chilly reception. France had capitulated the day after the ship left Le Verdon-sur-Mer,8 and General Charles-Auguste Noguès, the commander in chief of French forces in North Africa and governor-general of Morocco, was waiting to see which way the political wind was blowing in Paris. Though he personally believed that France was capable of carrying on the fight against Germany from North Africa, he did not want to seem overly welcoming to the politicians aboard Massilia—this despite having been appointed to the Moroccan governorship by Daladier. Noguès therefore ordered Daladier and several others detained on the ship under guard.
That detention lasted until June 27, when Daladier was able to travel to Noguès’s headquarters in Rabat. Though the two men agreed that French forces in North Africa had both the will and the wherewithal to continue the fight against Germany, Noguès refused to act without clear instructions from the rump government in Bordeaux. As Daladier later recalled, the general “was seeking government authorization to break with official policy and fight on, even if the government had to disavow its involvement in the process.”9 Noguès’s first few cables had gone unanswered, but on June 28 the general received a very definite reply: he was to abstain from any military action. Further, he was to detain Daladier and the other politicians in Morocco until after the scheduled July 10 vote in the National Assembly that was expected to ratify the Franco-German armistice and grant “full and extraordinary powers” to Marshal10 Philippe Pétain to form a new government to administer that part of France not yet occupied by German forces.
Having determined that cooperation with the new order was the better part of valor, Noguès immediately ordered that Daladier and the others not be allowed to board ship for the return passage to Bordeaux until after the crucial July 10 vote. When that balloting was over—and with Pétain confirmed as the new master of unoccupied France and his capital established at Vichy, a resort town about seventy miles northwest of Lyon—Noguès permitted Daladier to take ship for Bordeaux. He was not arrested upon his August 10 arrival, but he was immediately informed that the Vichy government intended to prosecute him—along with Blum, Gamelin, Mandel, Reynaud, former air force minister Guy La Chambre, and former army comptroller general Robert Jacomet—for their “responsibility” for France’s defeat by Germany. It was, of course, a political witch hunt intended to find scapegoats rather than the truth, but Daladier approached the trial as an opportunity to put Pétain and his collaborationist regime under the spotlight.
The trial was to be held in the town of Riom, some twenty miles southwest of Vichy, and the prospective defendants were told to stay in the vicinity. Daladier lodged with various friends in and around Vichy until September 6, when he was taken into custody and placed under house arrest at the Château Chazeron, a medieval castle-turned–country house a few miles outside Riom. He was eventually joined by Blum, Mandel, Reynaud, Gamelin, and the others. The defendants stayed in the drafty, poorly maintained chateau until October 15, 1941, when on the orders of Pétain they were transferred to the Fort du Portalet, an even more austere fortress in the rugged mountains of the Pyrenees near the Spanish border. Three months later Daladier, Blum, Gamelin, Jacomet, and La Chambre were transferred yet again, this time to a dilapidated country house at Bourassol, a few miles south of Riom. Reynaud and Mandel did not accompany the others, for Pétain had decided to withdraw the charges against the two. This did not gain them their freedom, however, for both remained in Vichy’s custody until they were turned over to the Germans.
At Bourassol, Daladier and his codefendants continued preparing their defense. When the trial finally began at Riom’s hurriedly renovated Palace of Justice on the afternoon of February 19, 1942, it must have been something of a relief for the five men to actually be able to answer the charges against them. They were under no illusions, of course, that their defense, however spirited, would actually prevent them from being found guilty. Indeed, four months earlier Pétain had made it perfectly clear how he expected things to go when he publicly announced the defendants’ guilt. The Vichy government intended the Riom Trial, as it became known, to be a blistering indictment of those it loudly proclaimed to be the “men who betrayed France.” And the fact that some two hundred French and foreign journalists would be permitted to observe the trial was a clear indication that Pétain and his supporters also meant the event to be a propaganda victory for Vichy, one in which Daladier and the others could be properly humiliated, discredited, and disgraced.
The details of the Riom Trial—as fascinating and historically important as they are—are outside the scope of this volume. Suffice it to say that things did not go at all as Pétain and his collaborationist government had intended. While Gamelin refused to recognize Vichy’s authority to try him and sat silent throughout the trial, Daladier and Blum mounted what can only be called a brilliant defense. Daladier’s knowledge of the events that transpired between the Popular Front’s electoral victory in 1936 and the French capitulation in 1940 was encyclopedic, and he was able to categorically refute virtually each point made by the poorly prepared and far less articulate prosecutors. And Blum’s eloquence and legal acumen—he was, after all, an extremely skilled lawyer as well as a brilliant politician—allowed him to conduct withering cross-examinations of government witnesses that soon revealed Vichy’s case against the five defendants to be nothing more than a politically motivated sham.
As the trial dragged on, Vichy’s German masters became increasingly frustrated with both the tribunal’s slow pace and the foreign press’s increasingly sympathetic portrayal of the defendants. Hitler himself expressed outrage that the court seemed incapable of shutting Blum and Daladier up, much less proving their culpability for “forcing” Germany to attack France in 1940. In order to avert any further excoriation of the Vichy regime—and, by extension, his own—in the world’s newspapers and to halt what was quickly becoming a public-relations nightmare, Hitler ordered the trial to be halted. On April 14, 1942, the president of the court, Pierre Caous, dutifully announced that the proceedings were to be “temporarily suspended”—after twenty-four public sessions—so that prosecutors could gather “further information.”
The temporary suspension of the Riom Trial lasted until May 21, 1943, when the proceedings were officially terminated. By that time, however, much had changed for both Daladier and France. Operation Torch—the November 8, 1942, British-American invasion of French North Africa—had prompted Hitler to order his forces into unoccupied France. Within days the entire country was firmly under German control, the Vichy regime was reduced to a true puppet government, and the position of Daladier and his fellow Riom defendants had become far more precarious. Though Jacomet and La Chambre were sentenced to continuing house arrest at Bourassol, Heinrich Himmler had ordered Daladier, Blum, and Gamelin moved to “secure locations” in Germany to prevent their “kidnapping” by Allied agents.11
The three men began their melancholy journey on March 31, 1943, when they left Bourassol under police guard in a five-car convoy. Their first stop was the small airport in nearby Clermont-Ferrand, where they were joined by labor leader Léon Jouhaux. By April 3 the four were at Paris’s Le Bourget airport, where they and their Gestapo escorts boarded a Luftwaffe transport bound for Mannheim and, ultimately, Frankfurt. From there the Frenchmen and their minders again traveled by road, and just after dawn on April 4 they arrived at their destination: the sprawling Buchenwald concentration camp12 near Weimar.
Compared with the horrific conditions endured by most of Buchenwald’s inmates, Daladier and the other French VIP prisoners lived in relative comfort. They were assigned individual rooms within the SS compound, which was separated from the main camp and surrounded by pine trees.13 Though the windows in their rooms were barred and their doors locked at night from the outside, the Frenchmen were well fed, were allowed to walk around the compound’s fenced perimeter (with guards, of course), and could write and receive letters. Perhaps just as important for these gregarious and once-powerful men, they were allowed to gather for a few hours each evening after dinner to share a bottle of German-provided cognac, smoke hand-rolled cigarettes of cheap Croatian tobacco, and dissect—often heatedly—the causes of their nation’s defeat.
Daladier’s sojourn at Buchenwald did not last long. On April 29 the camp’s commandant, Hermann Pister, told Daladier that he, Gamelin, and Jouhaux were to be transferred the following day to a “special facility” in the northern Tyrol, not far from Innsbruck. Ominously, Léon Blum would not accompany them; as a Jew, he was destined for “special detention,” Pister said. So, too, was Georges Mandel, who was to arrive at Buchenwald within a few days. Daladier was deeply troubled that his friend would be staying behind at the concentration camp, but Blum himself made light of it, saying that he and Mandel would “turn the place into a ghetto.”14
Just after dawn on April 30, Daladier, Gamelin, and Jouhaux said their good-byes to Blum and then were escorted by SS troops to the compound’s main gate. The plan soon changed, however, for Buchenwald’s assistant commandant arrived with news that their departure for Tyrol had been postponed, though he gave no reason. Finally, on the morning of May 2, Daladier and his companions stepped into a Mercedes staff car and, with their SS escort, set off for Munich and, ultimately, Schloss Itter.
The drive south was an eye-opening experience for the three Frenchmen, for even after nearly four years of war the roads of central and southern Germany were alive with military traffic. Several times field police soldiers15 waved the staff car and its escorts to the side of the road so long convoys of troop trucks, interspersed with vehicles towing artillery pieces and multibarreled rocket launchers, could move past unimpeded. Despite clear evidence of Allied air attacks—destroyed and damaged buildings, downed bridges, and vast stretches of heavily cratered landscape—it was depressingly obvious to the Frenchmen that Germany was far from beaten.
MAURICE GAMELIN WAS PERHAPS the most deeply affected by the seemingly endless display of the Wehrmacht’s combat power. The diminutive general—he stood barely five feet four inches tall—had spent more than fifty of his seventy-one years as an officer in his nation’s army, a force whose primary raison d’être for at least a generation had been to prevent the exact military catastrophe that had overtaken France in June 1940. And the fact that most of his countrymen seemed to believe that he was solely and personally responsible for France’s defeat and capitulation would have been a bitter pill to swallow for the erstwhile supreme commander of all French armed forces.
Gamelin’s rise to his nation’s highest military post seems, in retrospect, to have been almost preordained. He was born on September 20, 1872, in his family’s ornate home on Paris’s Boulevard Saint-Germain, literally just across the street from the French ministry of war. His father, Zéphyrin Gamelin, was a general and the army’s controller-general, or senior administrator.16 The younger Gamelin was educated at an elite Paris school, where he developed a deep and lifelong interest in art and philosophy, and in 1891 he entered the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, France’s foremost military academy. A gifted student, he graduated at the top of his 449-member class in 1893 and was commissioned a second lieutenant.
Over the following two decades Gamelin proved himself to be both an excellent staff officer and a tactical commander of rare skill. After his initial field assignment in French North Africa, he ascended steadily through the ranks, along the way acquiring such powerful mentors as General Joseph Joffre, commander in chief of the French army in the years leading up to World War I. By November 1913 he was a member of the General Staff’s operations bureau. In that position Gamelin helped develop the mobilization plan the army would put into motion in the event of war, and in March 1914 he was tapped to join Joffre’s personal staff.
While World War I was a bloody tragedy for France, it was a personal triumph for Gamelin. Alternating between important staff positions and field commands, he built a solid reputation as an innovative, highly capable, and politically astute officer who cared about his men and maintained his composure no matter what surprises were thrown at him. The best illustration of the latter attribute was his brilliant command of the 9th Infantry Division during the Germans’ massive spring offensive in 1918. Initially confronted by six enemy divisions, Gamelin ordered a fighting withdrawal that saved his division and, ultimately, allowed him to stop the German advance along the River Oise.
By the time the war ended in 1918, Gamelin was a brigadier general with a chest full of medals—both French and foreign. His wartime successes ensured his continued ascent in the postwar world, and he burnished his already lofty reputation with a series of highly successful assignments. He led the French military mission to Brazil from 1919 to 1925, commanded all French forces in Syria from 1925 to 1928,17 and in 1930 was named deputy to General Maxime Weygand, chief of the army general staff. Prime Minister André Tardieu intended Gamelin to be a forward-thinking and relatively liberal counterweight—and eventual successor—to the vastly more conservative Weygand. While the latter favored the complete overhaul and mechanization of the French army—and was especially fervent about the need to create independent armored units equipped with state-of-the-art tanks18—his notoriously abrasive personality and penchant for publicly belittling politicians foolish enough to disagree with him often negated his sincere efforts to improve his nation’s military readiness.
The Gamelin-Weygand partnership began well; indeed, soon after the former became his assistant in 1930, Weygand referred to him as “a colleague of peerless value.”19 Both officers were extremely wary of Germany’s growing military might, and they agreed wholeheartedly on the need to modernize the French army and construct a line of fortifications along the nation’s eastern frontier. But the honeymoon didn’t last long; in February 1931 Weygand became the army’s inspector general, and Gamelin replaced him as chief of staff, and from that point on the two men clashed with increasing frequency over the course, and cost, of France’s military rejuvenation.
For his part, the arch-conservative Weygand found it virtually impossible to deal with the series of leftist prime ministers who came to power from 1932 onward. He believed their internationalist and optimistic views of foreign relations to be naive and possibly subversive, and he strongly felt that their failure to adequately fund the large-scale weapon purchases he considered essential was making France increasingly vulnerable. Though Gamelin agreed with many of Weygand’s proposals, he also knew that alienating the politicians would be counterproductive. Gamelin was thus conciliatory where Weygand was confrontational, hoping to achieve through logic, persuasion, and compromise what would almost certainly not be gained through acrimonious intransigence. This point of view put him at odds with Weygand, who increasingly saw Gamelin as a dangerously indecisive leader whose beliefs and methods—which Weygand saw as holdovers from Gamelin’s World War I service—were perpetuating the army’s weakness and vastly increasing its risks of defeat in any conflict with Germany.
Gamelin’s point of view ultimately prevailed for the simple reason that in January 1935 Weygand reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-eight. Upon his departure, Gamelin replaced him not only as army chief of staff but also as both army inspector general and vice president of the Supreme War Council.20 The latter position made Gamelin the peacetime deputy to the minister of war, Louis Maurin. In wartime, the council’s vice president automatically became the commander of all French field armies.
Unfortunately for France, when the time came for Gamelin to actually take up the latter position—often referred to as “generalissimo”21—he proved consistently unequal to the monumental task facing him. Despite his genuine and consistent efforts during the inter-war years to improve the quality of the French army and the cooperation between military men and politicians, he dithered during the first few months of war. He failed to strike aggressively into Germany and preferred a static defense along the border based on the forts of the impressive, but incomplete, Maginot Line. When the so-called Phoney War ended with the German invasion of France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, he was slow to grasp the importance of the German thrust through the Ardennes, a rugged and heavily forested area he firmly believed to be impassable to tanks.
As French defeats mounted, Gamelin reacted by dismissing several of his field commanders, blaming the nation’s reversals on their “incompetence” rather than on his own strategic and tactical blunders. The man who had made a name for himself during the static, grinding bloodbath of World War I and in subsequent colonial wars ultimately proved incapable of responding effectively to Germany’s fast-paced and flexible combined-arms assault. Completely overwhelmed by blitzkrieg warfare, Gamelin continued to flounder until May 18, when Prime Minister Paul Reynaud sacked him and—adding insult to injury—called back Weygand as generalissimo.
Contrary to widespread rumors that he’d killed himself or fled the country,22 Gamelin spent the weeks between his dismissal and France’s capitulation to Germany at his home in Paris, tending his roses and listening to the increasingly dire news from the battlefronts. He expected the Nazis to arrest him, of course, when they arrived in the capital; what he hadn’t anticipated was that he’d be taken into custody by fellow Frenchmen. On September 6, 1940—the same day Daladier was seized—Gamelin was visiting his friend Léo-Abel Gaboriaud, editor of the journal L’Ère nouvelle, when agents of the Sûreté Nationale23 appeared at the door. They explained that they were reluctantly working under orders from the Germans to arrest Gamelin and transport him to the Château Chazeron. Gaboriaud walked with his friend to the waiting car, and, as the officers were about to put him in the backseat, the editor looked at them sternly and said, “The man you have taken into custody and who is leaving with you is alive. I assume he will be alive when he gets to Chazeron.”24
Though Gaboriaud’s concern for Gamelin’s continued well-being was understandable, the diminutive general made it to Chazeron—and through the Riom trial—unscathed. While his subsequent incarceration with Daladier and the others in Buchenwald cannot have been salutary, his daily ritual of vigorous calisthenics followed by a few brisk turns around the inside of the small VIP compound’s perimeter ensured that upon his arrival at Schloss Itter he was in reasonably good health for a man his age.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the third man Zvonko Čučković saw step out of the Mercedes staff car in the castle’s courtyard.
THOUGH JUST SIXTY-FOUR YEARS OLD, Léon Jouhaux looked a good deal older. The secretary-general of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), one of France’s largest trade unions, had for several months been suffering from a flare-up of the arthritis that had plagued him for decades. More seriously, any sort of stress or anxiety brought on increasingly significant chest pain.25 Convinced his heart was beginning to fail him but lacking a diagnosis or any sort of medication, the stout labor leader could do little but stoically accept his worsening condition.
Such passive acceptance was a trait new to Jouhaux, for his had not been an easy life.26 Born in a poor section of Paris in 1879, he’d always been a fighter: first against childhood illness and schoolyard bullies, and for most of his adult life against social injustice in general and the oppression of working people in particular. He’d learned his radical activism from his father, who in 1871 had taken to the streets during the popular uprising that came to be known as the Paris Commune. When Jouhaux was two years old, his father left his job in a central-city slaughterhouse and moved the family to Aubervilliers, a less-crowded suburb, where work in a match factory offered marginally better pay.
The conditions in the new workplace were no better than those in the slaughterhouse, however. Workers toiled long hours in dismal and dangerous conditions, unable to escape the pervasive, toxic, and highly explosive fumes produced by the white phosphorous that was the match heads’ main ingredient. The elder Jouhaux ultimately became a leader in the factory’s nascent labor union and several times led the workers out on strikes meant to force the bosses to improve safety and working conditions. When Léon was twelve, his father’s activism finally led to yet another long-term suspension from the match factory, an event that forced his intellectually gifted son to leave school and find a job in order to help support the family.
The young Jouhaux first went to work at Aubervilliers’s Central Melting House, a foundry where conditions were miserable. When his father regained his position at the match factory, Jouhaux was able to go back to school, but nine months later his father was again laid off, so the boy took a job at a soap works. At the age of sixteen Léon himself went to work at the match factory, where he immediately joined the union his father had worked so hard to create. From that point on—except for a single year he was able to spend at a vocational school—Jouhaux was, as he later said, “completely caught up in the hard life of the industrial worker.”27
In 1900 Jouhaux exchanged that form of hard life for another when he was called up for military service. After initial training he was dispatched to Algeria, where he served with the 1st Regiment of Zouaves. However, he was sent home and released from service in 1903 because his father—who had lost and regained his job several more times—had gone blind as a result of his long exposure to white phosphorous. Jouhaux went back to work in the match factory, where in addition to laboring on the production line he also replaced his father on the union’s leadership committee. Sincerely dedicated to improving the lot of all workers, he quickly proved himself to be both a natural leader and a tough negotiator who was not afraid to go toe-to-toe with the bosses and the thugs they hired to break strikes.
Indeed, so effective were Jouhaux’s tactics at the match factory that he soon came to the attention of national labor leaders. He was invited to join the executive committee of the CGT in 1906 and was soon working full-time on issues important to workers throughout France. Though he continued to be known as a tough negotiator, he also developed a healthy pragmatism that allowed him to compromise when it helped to ultimately advance the cause of the CGT and its members. Following several early successes, in 1909 he was named the CGT’s secretary-general, a promotion that made him, at just thirty years old, arguably the most powerful labor leader in France.
Among the most pressing problems Jouhaux faced in his first years as head of the CGT was the rising tide of militarism in Europe. Believing that wars made workers suffer solely to further enrich their capitalist bosses, Jouhaux joined with other European labor leaders to endorse disarmament and universal antimilitarism. Yet when Europe descended into war in 1914—despite what Jouhaux later called the labor leaders’ “best efforts to build a dike against the onrushing sea of blood”28—union members in each warring nation rallied to the colors and enlisted in droves. The reality of war changed even Jouhaux’s mind: he quickly came to see that a German victory could very well lead to the virtual enslavement of French workers, and thereafter he worked diligently to support the French war effort.
Despite that support, Jouhaux never lost the belief that the working people of the world could ultimately help make war obsolete if they banded together in an international trade-union movement, and he worked diligently to make such an alliance a reality. He was a major player in the post–World War I reconstitution of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) and in 1919 became the organization’s vice president even while maintaining his role as head of the CGT. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he tirelessly exerted his considerable influence to bring together Europe’s disparate labor organizations. In November 1937 Jouhaux was one of three IFTU leaders who traveled to Moscow for talks regarding the affiliation of Soviet Russia’s Central Council of Trade Unions with the IFTU. Despite being a staunch anticommunist, Jouhaux maintained that such an affiliation was logical as a reaction to the growing power of fascism in both Germany and Italy, but his recommendation that the IFTU establish close and pragmatic ties with the Soviet organization was rejected by the full board of the IFTU.29
Jouhaux’s efforts to help avert another world war were ultimately in vain, of course. Following France’s June 1940 capitulation, Vichy ordered the CGT dissolved, prompting many of its members to form a nascent resistance movement. Jouhaux’s outspoken criticism of the Pétain regime ensured that his name soon ended up on an arrest list, and a warrant was issued for him in October 1940. He’d already gone underground, however, traveling within unoccupied France on false papers that identified him as a Czech named Bedrich Woves.30 He was referred to as “Mr. Buvot” by the compatriots who helped him move from one safe house to another but signed his own name to the many pamphlets he wrote, urging all true trade unionists to support the Allied cause and pleading for unity among France’s fractious left-wing groups. To pass his writings on to those who would reproduce and distribute them, Jouhaux relied on his secretary and longtime companion (and future wife), Augusta Bruchlen,31 an Alsace-born Frenchwoman whose fluency in German several times helped her escape detection as she was attempting to contact members of the resistance movement that had grown out of the now-banned CGT.
In January 1940 the IFTU’s London-based executive committee decided that all of the major labor leaders in continental Europe should be evacuated to Britain, and Jouhaux was the first on their list. The organization initially approached the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS),32 which favored the IFTU’s plan but was ultimately unable to put it into operation. Following Britain’s July 1940 creation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE)—a quasi-military organization specifically tasked with undertaking clandestine activities in enemy-occupied territories—the IFTU approached its political head, Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton. A longtime socialist, Dalton wholeheartedly agreed that Jouhaux would be far more valuable to the Allied cause working in London than he would be rotting in a Vichy or German prison.33 Dalton therefore used his considerable influence to ensure that Jouhaux’s escape from France became a top SOE priority.
By early November 1941 SOE had arranged for the labor leader to be smuggled out of France into neutral Portugal, where he was to board a flight for Britain. A double agent within the CGT resistance apparently got wind of the attempted escape, however, and betrayed the plan to the Vichy secret police. Jouhaux was arrested at the port of Marseilles on November 26,34 1941, just as he was about to take ship—using his false papers—for Portugal.
After his arrest Jouhaux was driven to Vals-les-Bains, a small spa town nestled in the Rhône-Alpes, where he was held incommunicado as his Vichy captors pondered what to do with him. At the end of January 1942 he was moved to Cahors, a quaint medieval town some ninety miles northwest of Vals-les-Bains, where he lived under house arrest until the beginning of November. He was then moved yet again, this time to the spa town of Évaux-les-Bains in central France, in which the Vichy regime had established a centralized internment center for top-level political prisoners. The accommodations were relatively civilized—the captives were housed in the town’s former Grand Hotel—and about a month after his arrival Jouhaux was permitted a visit from Augusta Bruchlen. In January 1943 she herself was arrested by the Sûreté, apparently because of her work as a courier between Jouhaux and the CGT resistance. Eventually interned in the same Grand Hotel, she was apparently no longer considered a major threat, because her captors allowed her twice-weekly visits with Jouhaux, albeit in the presence of a policeman.35 These occasions did much to cheer the labor leader, who had for several months been suffering from a prolonged arthritis flare-up and increasingly severe angina.
Jouhaux’s idyll in Évaux-les-Bains ended abruptly on the night of March 31, 1943. A squad of German soldiers hustled him from his room with little more than the clothes on his back, handcuffed him, and shoved him into the back of a waiting military ambulance. With a German guard sitting on either side of him, he was driven to the airport in Clermont-Ferrand, where he joined Daladier and Gamelin for the journey to Buchenwald and, ultimately, Schloss Itter.
FOR SEBASTIAN WIMMER, the arrival of the castle’s first three honor prisoners marked the beginning of what he fervently hoped would be a very rewarding phase in his career. He was, after all, commandant of what was planned to be arguably the most important and high-profile subcamp in all of Nazi Germany’s sprawling concentration-camp system and would be responsible for some of the Third Reich’s most valuable captives. If Wimmer played his cards right, he could win promotion, decorations, and, with luck, even personal recognition from the führer. And, perhaps most important, if his performance in this key post managed to sufficiently please his superiors in both Dachau and Berlin, he’d be able to avoid returning to a vastly less comfortable life working in one of the death camps or, far worse, actual front-line combat duty.
Though a brutal thug by both nature and training, Wimmer understood that his success as commandant of Schloss Itter would result in large part from his ability to treat his important prisoners with a level of “correctness” that was wholly outside his realm of experience. Because the führer might have future plans for the VIP captives—perhaps handing them over to the Allies as part of some political accommodation or even releasing them as a gesture of magnanimity after Germany’s ultimate victory—Wimmer would have to do his best to keep them healthy and secure. And though he was certainly not the most intelligent man in the SS, even Wimmer understood that a German victory was not guaranteed: the Fatherland had already suffered a string of battlefield reversals, and Allied aircraft were turning the nation’s industrial centers into smoking rubble with almost monotonous regularity. Wimmer realized very clearly that should Germany lose the war, having a few French VIPs testify that he treated them well might be the only thing that would save him from an Allied firing squad.
Attempting to strike a balance between correctness and the proper level of stern aloofness he felt his position required, Wimmer nodded to Daladier, Gamelin, and Jouhaux as they walked toward him after alighting from the staff car that had brought them to Itter, but he did not attempt to shake their hands. Flanked by members of the castle’s SS guard detachment, the three Frenchmen followed Wimmer through the arched portal in the center of the schlosshof and across the large enclosed terrace that led to the vaulted entrance36 to the castle’s main hall. Stefan Otto of the SD was waiting, and, as Wimmer looked on, the younger officer assigned each of the Frenchmen a room—Otto was careful not to use the word “cell”—Jouhaux in number 9 on the second floor, and Gamelin and Daladier in numbers 10 and 11, respectively, on the third floor.37
Otto then solemnly read the new arrivals the decidedly relaxed rules of their captivity. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner would be served in the ground-floor dining hall, and they could take the meals back to their rooms if they chose or, in good weather, eat at tables on the adjoining terrace. Each man would receive a hundred liters of wine per month, as well as a monthly allowance of 500 Reichsmarks with which to purchase tobacco, writing paper, pens, and other sundries from a small kiosk tucked beneath the stairs on the ground floor. The prisoners would be able to send mail to, and receive it from, members of their immediate families, though all mail would, of course, be censored. The men would have free access to the castle’s library and would even be permitted to listen to the large radio that graced the main hall—though the device was tuned exclusively to Radio Berlin. And, finally, each man could exercise in the large courtyard to the rear of the castle, which encompassed a thirteenth-century garden and fountain, in the morning and afternoon.
Lest the three Frenchmen somehow forget that they were indeed prisoners, Otto then spelled out a few harder facts. They were under the absolute control of the Third Reich and would obey the orders of Commandant Wimmer immediately and without question or argument. The men would each be locked into their rooms from eleven at night until seven in the morning. They would not be permitted to leave the castle without an SS escort, and, if discovered outside the schloss alone at any time, they would be considered escapees and could be shot on sight.
With the reading of the regulations completed, the Frenchmen were escorted to their rooms and locked in so that Wimmer could gather all his troops in the 150-foot-by-100-foot rear courtyard. He wanted to make a brief but pointed announcement, one probably largely intended to ensure that none of the SS men inadvertently violated the correctness Wimmer hoped would either be good for his career or save his neck:
The three people who have just arrived to be imprisoned in the castle are French. They will be joined by others. By command of the führer, these prisoners are to be viewed as hostages. Upon meeting one of them you should salute them with a regular military salute, and not with the führer salute. If one of these gentlemen should attempt to speak to you, your response should be the following: “Your Excellence, would you please speak to Commandant Wimmer?” Understood?38
The ground rules firmly established, the guards and their prisoners began settling into a daily routine. For the former this revolved around the usual on- and off-duty periods, interspersed with the occasional recreational foray into Itter or Wörgl. For the latter, the days were primarily built around mealtimes—breakfast at eight, lunch at two, and dinner at seven. The food—prepared by the guard detachment’s supply sergeant, Oschbald, and two junior soldiers—was plain but plentiful and was the same as that served to the SS troops. Between meals the three Frenchmen passed the time reading, talking, or walking around the inner courtyard. After dinner the men would share a cognac—from a bottle presented to them by Wimmer in a transparent attempt to curry favor—and some conversation; then each would repair to his own room to work on the notes and journals intended to form the basis for their exculpatory postwar memoirs.
But Schloss Itter had not been converted into a high-security prison in order to house just Daladier, Gamelin, and Jouhaux. The bureaucrats at Dachau intended to fill as many of the cells as possible, and over time the Tyrolean castle welcomed an additional fifteen “honor” prisoners, each with his or her own story.